1. Field of the Invention
The disclosed embodiments relate generally to network communications bandwidth management and in particular to unified bandwidth manager that interfaces with and hierarchically manages a plurality of service-specific bandwidth reservation and session management systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Over many years there has been a number of communication services designed to operate over the internet and other networks, each with special performance requirements for their networked communications. These requirements may include near-real-time delivery, streaming, bandwidth volumes, and so on. Often, these attributes motivate the use of special network protocols and/or bandwidth reservation systems. Such bandwidth reservation systems generally provide the following capabilities:
Protect the amount of bandwidth reserved on the network for real-time and near-real-time communications. In essence, the system takes steps to ensure that the amount of bandwidth required for a call or session is available for the duration of that session to ensure a high quality-of-experience to the end user.
Constrain the amount of bandwidth available for real-time or near-real-time communications to make sure that those communications do not interfere with other traffic on the network. For example, users making video calls shouldn't cause SAP to come to a grinding halt or stop Citrix applications from working.
Police access to available bandwidth by integrating with the signaling infrastructure and implementing strategies for dealing with bandwidth shortage at call setup time.
In many cases, a given bandwidth reservation system pertains only to a particular communication service, or only to a particular communications application, or only to a particular manufacturer's application product line, or even only to a particular manufacturer's application. As a result, there is a proliferation of purpose-specific bandwidth reservation systems being sold by manufacturers and being installed in enterprise networks. For convenience, each such purpose-specific bandwidth reservation system and its associated communications application(s) as a “communications silo.” Typical commercial communications silos are directed at services such as IP-telephony (also known as Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP”) and video conferencing. The communications silo concept also naturally extends to real-time streaming audio and streaming video enterprise or internet webcast sessions, as well as to playback of recorded streaming audio and streaming video. The communications silo concept can also be adapted to other types of web servers, although in cases wide variations in packet traffic can require additional consideration.
U.S. pending patent application Ser. No. 12/198,085 teaches, among other things, exemplary systems and methods for a Unified Bandwidth Manager for monitoring and for controlling the affairs of a plurality of such bandwidth allocation communications silos. The control capabilities taught include human-operator control, assistance to human-operator control, and automatic control.